MP Sci-Fi DUNE: THE BATTLE FOR ARRAKIS (Progress Update 01/20/2014)

Oh yeah, I went there. And I drank spice liquor and rode the mighty Shai-Hulud.

Since previous Arrakis-based mods have ultimately petered out, I thought I would announce my creation of a multiplayer mod based on Frank Herbert's Dune series.

The concept is to use some visual aspects from the 1984 movie, in a gritty, persistent world style environment, based on the first novel in the series. Where neither the movie nor the book are entirely clear about facts, I have used my own ingenuity - I believe you will enjoy the practice dummies, for instance.

Progress Update 1/20/2014


What I have so far:

* Persistent-World-style play. Round time limit will be maxxed out to 9998 minutes, and the mode will be similar to Deathmatch, with strict server rules to prevent pvp harassment. Some of these rules are explained below.

* Sandstorms! These are in, random, and quite impressive. Screenshots wouldn't do them justice.

* Six different character types: Fremen Fedaykin, Mentat Assassin, Bene Gesserit Witch, Sardaukar Bashar, Atreides Corpsman, and Harkonnen Soldier. Each will begin the game with different choices for armor, different weapon specialties, different stats, and a dagger. There will be two factions with the same character choices so characters can kill themselves to switch characters, etc.

* Huge, multiplayer "world map" of Arrakis, everyone's favorite ball of sci-fi dust. Areas for Harkonnen, Atreides and Fremen are in place. These (along with the Imperial Sardaukar) will be considered the informal factions of the mod, or "Houses". The Mentats and Bene Gesserit are considered wild-card classes, and can call wherever they like home.

* Equipment crates. ~ Lasgun Rifles, Lasgun Pistols, Stunner Pistols, Maula Pistols, Crysknives, Maker Hooks, Guard Lances, Gom Jabbar, Sardaukar Swords, Inkvine Whips, Kindjals, Slip-Tips (these are lefthand "shield" weapons), and a few old weapons like daggers, throwing daggers, bows and arrows. All will be buyable via crates found throughout Arrakis. Some will be rare and only found in one place, promoting exploration and gamer interaction other than killing.

* Jobs. ~ Lots of ways to make money. The current list is as follows, with increasing pay: Interrogate Prisoner, Combat Training, Count Water, Peddle Water, Make Daggers, Serve Spice Coffee, Serve Spice Liquor, Play Drum, Guard Outpost, Play Baliset, Repair Ornithopter, Inspire Soldiers, Sell Pleasure, and Mine Spice. Some of these, like equipment crates, can only be found in certain places.

* Many ways to heal. ~ You can Drink Water, Drink Sapho Juice, Take Semuta, Drink Spice, or Buy Pleasure, for increasingly powerful (and expensive) healing boosts. Spice and Sapho also produce hallucinations. Semuta also produces eerie "music".

* Stillsuits for the Fremen, both male and female. I am quite proud of these.

* Duplicates for all native faces with the deep-blue spice-induced eye color, the red sappho-juice stains for mentats, or both. ~ According to server rules you will have to use skins with the "eyes of Ibad" if you want to drink spice, and the skins with ruby lips if you want to drink sapho juice, or the skins with both if you want to drink both. Additionally, only Mentats will be allowed sapho juice.

* Sandworm Mounts. ~ They are in, and very fast. These will be more or less the ultimate achievement on the mod, and since they are the only mount, the going will be rough at first. Remember to wear your boots slip-fashion at the heels.

Working on:

* Night/Day cycles. ~ If I can do sandstorms, I might be able to do night via scene props as well. I haven't looked into this much yet.

* Stilltents. ~ These pop up as an overlay during the worst of sandstorms, and all movement is canceled during that time. Working on restricting looking around while in the stilltent, and then this feature will be finished.

* Imperial Heighliner. ~ So far, we have Sietch Tabr for the Fremen, Arrakeen for the Atreides, and the Guild Ship for Harkonnens. I am also adding an Imperial Heighliner, which will be reachable via an ornithopter (just being used as a teleporter for now). The ship is so large it would stretch from Arrakeen to the Harkonnen ship - essentially providing a whole other map level above the desert. It even has two of the guild ships (like the Harkonnen base) parked inside. And boxes, boxes, boxes. Stellar Cartography will be a means of making money here, and I will be adding a Guild Steersman prop eventually. Mostly this area is to provide a base for the Imperials, and an epic space battleground.


Development Screenshots:


















"Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting." - Gurney Halleck

Sounds nice - but no Ordos? 
I thought Mentats were from the house of Ordos!

Too sweet great idea

Holy ****.

I'm curious about how you may implement stuff other than melee. Can scripting make it so that both parties die if lasguns are used on shields?

Also, are you taking visual cues from the film or the two miniseries, or both, not counting your own imagination?

The Shields/Lasgun thing is something I'm going to overlook for now, for the sake of fun.

And the inspiration is from a little bit of everything - the movies, the miniseries, sketches from the Dune Wiki, etc. I'll use my imagination on some of it of course, but I think it will definitely have the right feel...

That screenie made me wildly scroll the site up and down, before I finally get myself calm.

N0ught, sir, you're my official idol. Like pagan god synonym, not like American idol

Hey, just voicing my interest in this mod. I am a great fan of the Dune books! (Well, Dune, and Children of Dune anyway.) Wishing you heaps of luck with this - I will be watching this thread. I saw some of your other work and you seem a very talented modder. Have been hoping for this mod for ages! YAY! Thankyou.

P.S. If you do have a Persistent World - please make the map bigger than it is currently with the other persistent world mods - as it will look pretty bad with the Atreides Fortress only a couple of hundred metres away from open desert and cave complexes.

While this sounds great, I know very little about the universe. I'd really like to see your work in Warband Nought.

Is there somewhere I can look to get a good summary of the universe?

Chii said:

Sounds nice - but no Ordos? 
I thought Mentats were from the house of Ordos!

Click to expand...

They are only in the game.
Frank Herbert accept them as a minor house, but he didn't put in the books. Other houses aren't so interesting as Ordos, mainly because they are in prequels.
However there could be other factions like smugglers and Tleilaxu (Honored Matres are too recent to appear).

Thought I would update you all with some screenshots of the awesome fremen/sardaukar battles I have been enjoying. I like the closeup on the stillsuit texture in this shot:


Ah, some bloodspray. What a waste of water:


A nice shot of Arrakis' two moons:


Wait for it...:


KNIFETOTHEFACE!  :


A better look at the Sardaukar uniforms:


Wait for it...:


ANOTHERKNIFETOTHEFACE! :


Anyway, things are coming along very well, as you can see. Bene Gesserit Witches are going in next, followed by Mentats, and House Atreides and House Harkonnen troops. Fun times and spice liquor will be had by all.

The Factions will be as follows:

                              Armor              Melee                Ranged
Fremen                    Medium            Medium            Light
Sardaukar                Light                Medium            Medium
Bene-Gesserit          Light                Heavy              Light
Mentat                    Medium            Light                Medium
House Atreides        Heavy              Light                  Light
House Harkonnen    Light                Light                  Heavy

... The first release will be a basic multiplayer mod, with these available factions. Eventually when I get the huge map/resource gathering/persistant word-style version put together, the "universal" factions will each consist of a character from each group. As you can see I have gone to the length of outlining the strengths and weaknesses of each Faction.

wow, great idea and very promising screenies...
I'd love to play this mod, so good luck with it and thx for your work 

The gift is the blessing of the giver - O.C. Bible

I have the basic uniforms for all multiplayer classes complete, and all of the weapons listed below. There will be FOUR factions, as listed:

                                              Armor        Melee      Ranged
Fremen - Banner: Blue on Black
Fremen Soldier                      Medium    Medium    Light      Weapons: Crysknife, Throwing Daggers
Mentat Watermaster              Medium    Light        Medium  Weapons: Dagger, Dartgun
Bene Gesserit Sayyadina        Light        Heavy      Light      Weapons: Gom Jabbar, Bow

Imperial - Banner: Gold on White
Sardaukar Soldier                    Light        Medium    Medium  Weapons: Sword, Laspistol
Mentat Tactician                      Medium    Light          Medium  Weapons: Dagger, Dartgun
Bene Gesserit Truthsayer        Light        Heavy        Light      Weapons: Gom Jabbar, Bow

House Atreides - Banner: Green on Black
Atreides Soldier                        Heavy      Light        Light      Weapons: Dagger, Laspistol
Mentat Assassin                      Medium    Light        Medium  Weapons: Dagger, Dartgun
Bene Gesserit Concubine          Light        Heavy      Light      Weapons: Gom Jabbar, Bow

House Harkonnen - Banner: Blue on White
Harkonnen Soldier                    Light        Light        Heavy Weapons: Dagger, Lasrifle
Twisted Mentat                        Medium    Light      Medium    Weapons: Dagger, Dartgun
Bene Gesserit Torturer            Light        Heavy      Light        Weapons: Gom Jabbar, Bow

... Now if a certain somebody would finish their multiplayer map tutorial, I could get to work on a huge map. I have already altered three of the basic maps - the Ruins is now the smouldering Ruins of the Residency at night (pictured in previous screenshots) with an AMAZING sky, the Village has been changed a bit to become the Streets of Arrakeen, and I turned the Ruined Keep into a Dustbowl. These will be good for an initial release if my giant map takes too long, or in general if someone hosts a deathmatch server.

I have made faces for "spice-eyes", "mentat-lips", and a combination of both. Female characters will not have the Sappho-stained lips, nor will they be able to choose to be Mentats or Sardaukar. Likewise, there will be no male Bene Gesserit. And all Fremen MUST have the blue-in-blue eyes. anything else will be free game, though.

Oh, and when I am on the server I get to be Paul Atreides.

this is awsome. i saw dune the first time when i was eleven and i loved it! 

Read the book you'll love it better - though I cannot be held responsible for boredom-induced injuries due to reading the rest of the series...

We have a BIG map now (I maxed out the size), and a spice harvester scene prop on one end, sitting in a nice blue patch of spice sand. I will be adding the ability to mine spice for gold next, and once that is implemented I will be adding many other ways to make money "resource-gathering style" - lecturing soldiers on combat strategy will be one of them, and so will playing music, preaching from the O.C. Bible, etc.

After that it's a matter of scene props. I can use mostly the native buildings, etc. I have been working on a weather setup - so far I can make it nighttime, daytime, and dust-haze filled. Added wind sounds. All four factions are done for the preliminary release, and their banners are created. All-in-all, things are progressing quite well.

Now I go to make the spice flow as it must...

I'm a huge fan of the Dune books, up to God Emperor, and I cannot wait for this mod(Really, I can contain myself that long though).

Are worms still going to be included (as originally promised in the first thread)? And are you going to try and get flying working for ornithopters (as unfortunately not promised)?
I think they would be great features that would sell this mod to all the plebes that aren't fans of Dune already - and help bring in the whole atmosphere for those that are...

BTW are you going to fix the problem with the beards in still suits?

Worms yes. Ornithopters, probably not. One thing that will lend towards the feel of Arrakis will be having to walk everywhere - and I think I will include a trigger that causes a little damage every so often if you are outside settlements without a stillsuit. Summoning worms and spice mining will both be dangerous as they both will have a chance of summoning a hostile Sandworm. The various ways of gathering gold will also gather more based on how far outside of civilization they are - watercounting and spice mining will likely be the most lucrative.

As far as beards go,  they will poke through a bit - the only way to prevent this would also make everyone bald. And hey I like smooth fremen women too but lets not get carried away.

I have been thinking of a simple little trigger that will transfer a player's gold to the killer of the player. That should make things a bit more brutal.

Lots of ideas, and I'm putting the console in the spice harvester - and then I must figure out how to turn it into a time-based activated scene prop that rewards gold. If anyone has any complete code to handle items like this I would prefer a post to muddling through - not much about it in the forums.

N0ught said:

All-in-all, things are progressing quite well.

Click to expand...

great to hear, really looking forward to this mod...